In this case I’m building software whose primary selling point is “trivial to install on practically any cheap-ass $1/mo shared web host, just unzip and FTP the files to your website folder” - which is the whole reason it’s written in PHP in the first place.
(The more I think about it, the more sad I am that it’s 2021 and still no other language has come close to PHP’s low barrier to entry...)
PHP 8.x is very easy to install on debian by adding deb.sury.org to apt sources.
Yes. Just as an example, I use VSCode. VSCode no longer works on CentOS 7. It needs a newer glibc, so I'm going to have to recompile a lot of stuff and do some PATH fiddling to get it to work.
It's usually not that it's hard to do that for your packages. It's when their dependencies go out of date and I'm looking at having to build a Frankenstein system where I'm running one up to date system on top of a really out of date one, and trying to make the two co-exist in a single OS.
It's not insurmountable, but it's enough effort that dealing with occasional Arch breakage becomes easier. Or even something in between like Ubuntu.
Re:Debian 11
by CogitoCogito on Sunday August 15, 2021 @02:32AM
(#28186660)
Well I was referring specifically to debian and to PHP. Does VSCode really not compile on debian 10 or 11? I find that a little surprising. But yeah I agree that installing newer dependencies like glibc for VSCode would certainly be a hassle. I can't really speak much to that though since I've never used it.
VSCode is probably not the best example, because it has official packages for Debian (among many other things):
edit: I guess if you work somewhere with a policy of requiring you to use system packages, you're a little screwed, but that seems more of an organizational problem than a debian problem.